The invention is related to the technical sector of production and processing non-food agricultural plant or organic materials to retrieve carbon for recycling.
The applicant has acquired solid expertise and has extensive know-how in the context of carbon production from recovered organic solids. The applicant notably holds many patents filed internationally starting with patents FR No. 2,734,741, No. 2,885,909 and No. 2,888,230. The applicant thus came to use the methods and installations described in these documents to produce carbon in the form of solid elements with very high carbon content.
In the context of his development research, the applicant also became interested in what happens to non-food biomass such as agricultural plant waste, which has a significant carbon content that is usually not used, or barely.
The applicant's application arose from a current de facto situation, which is the use of bioenergies to reduce a country or group of countries' energy dependence on oil. Everyone knows that oil is an energy which, in the coming years, will decrease or even disappear if we consider the ever rising worldwide demand and the reserves which are not inexhaustible. We are therefore turning toward the search for substitution products, and bioenergies are a possible response to this need.
The problem is that bioenergy production largely focuses on grain and oilseed crops which currently are mainly, and even almost exclusively, used for food consumption by populations. These grain and oilseed crops have added value that depends on the market. But if these crops are transferred to other applications such as synthesized bio fuels, there is a risk over time, given the much higher added values, of destabilizing the agri-food market and an impoverishing the potential food supply for the population due to the deficit caused by producing biofuels. Indeed, their production requires considerable crop areas. In other words, if we continue in this direction, we are headed for major antagonistic conflict of interest situations to the detriment of the basic priority of feeding people.
It is therefore in this context that the applicant, given his own knowledge of producing carbon from organic solids, looked into the production of vegetable carbon, i.e. the production of carbonaceous matter from non-food agricultural biomass with a view to then, in an advantageous application, participating in the integration of this carbonaceous matter into the production of synthetic biofuels.
In other words, the applicant's approach was to develop a production method for so-called vegetable carbon from non-food agricultural biomass. There is a considerable volume of non-food agricultural biomass in the world, which is reproduced year after year, creating a nearly inexhaustible source of raw materials without disturbing or exhausting arable land, which is limited.
The transfer of knowledge, notably from the applicant's different previous patents, as indicated above, is not applicable to processing non-food agricultural biomass to obtain vegetable carbon. The research undertaken by the applicant led to the production of so-called vegetable carbon by including other production parameters that are totally inexistent in the aforementioned known technology. It was therefore necessary to implement another method optimized in relation to the prior art with, as a consequence, a different installation.